Introduction Water cooling of computers was introduced more than twenty years ago, but had disappeared from the mainstream by the mid 1990s. The conversion of chip technology from bipolar to CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) was the main reason. As chip powers continue to increase, water cooling appears likely to become mainstream again. In the current market, the … [Read more...]
Communication Network Power Efficiency Assessment, Limitations and Directions
Introduction Despite the slowdown in the communication industry, Internet traffic continues to grow rapidly, fueled by the explosion in data communications, mobile Internet, e-commerce, content rich applications, and multi-media services. Internet traffic has increased by approximately 80% yearly in each of the last three years, and will continue to grow at 60 - 80% annually … [Read more...]
Cooling Technology Options, Part 2
(Editor's Note: Part 1 of this article appeared in the August 2003 issue of ElectronicsCooling. Illustration references in this part begin with Figure 5.) Cooling electronic systems is one of the major focal points of the design process and the key to a successful product launch. Many options to attain successful operation are available, ranging from passive cooling to … [Read more...]
Electroosmotic Microchannel Cooling System for Microprocessors
Computer heat sinks, such as fin arrays and heat pipes, are much larger than silicon chips and are continuing to grow in size. This trend is driven by the increasing chip heat generation rates and has serious implications for overall system performance. The large volume of existing heat sinks causes discrete memory, video, and power-delivery components to be crowded away from … [Read more...]
Thermal Design Challenges in Automotive Alternator Power Electronics
Ever since the advent of the automotive alternator, or claw-pole alternating current generator, in the 1960's, there has been an ever-increasing thermal design challenge to cool the power electronics in these machines. Figure 1 depicts a typical cutaway section of a modern day alternator. At first glance one may think that cooling the diodes in a rectifier bridge of an … [Read more...]
